Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a long game. I made a fork to shorten it a lot (as in, removing almost all branches). I think the game is more fun this way, and I explain my reasons why (and more exact details of what's changed) in the readme of the repository, which is here: https://github.com/dcandido/crawl

You can also download zips for Windows from there.

This fork does not change many different things. It has one, simple objective; Dungeon Crawl, just shorter. If you like crate crawl, I think you'll like this fork.

Do you plan to continue work on it or is this more a once off code drop?

In terms of feedback, your manifesto is about keeping a steady level of challenge. But I think there is a huge difficulty spike from D:15 to U:1. Do you plan to smooth this by tweaking monster lists for the two branches?

chequers wrote:Do you plan to continue work on it or is this more a once off code drop?

I feel like I have accomplished my goal of shortening crawl, so I don't see anything else to do at the moment. If I feel there is a better way to do this, then yes, I'll probably do some more work on it. One thing I've been thinking about is taking out Depths and Zot, and putting Vaults at the end of Dungeon, and putting the Orb of Zot in place of the Silver Rune. That would be good too, and a bit closer to crate crawl, but I'm not sure if it would be more or less fun than the current rendition.

chequers wrote:In terms of feedback, your manifesto is about keeping a steady level of challenge.

Correction: my manifesto is that the game should challenge you all or most of the time to prevent the player going on autopilot. I am fine with the game spiking from interestingly hard to nearly impossibly hard, since the player would be engaged (as in, not on autopilot) and notice the spike.

This is likely to cause a large jump in apparent difficulty around D:11, and again at Depths. Do you plan to adjust experience at all in your fork?

That is exactly what I have done. Personally, I find that the jump at D:11 (edit: to be precise, the difficulty divergence starts at D:8, since that is normally your first chance to find the Lair) is quite small compared to the jump at Depths. Walking into Depths gives me the tingles - it's quite exciting! I have no plan to adjust it.

stormdragon wrote:That is exactly what I have done. Personally, I find that the jump at D:11 (edit: to be precise, the difficulty divergence starts at D:8, since that is normally your first chance to find the Lair) is quite small compared to the jump at Depths. Walking into Depths gives me the tingles - it's quite exciting! I have no plan to adjust it.

I would submit that removing Lair doesn't add a jump, it gets rid of a ditch. D:10 -> D:11 isn't a much bigger difficulty change than D:9 -> D:10 is, whereas D:10 -> [entire branch] -> D:11 ends up being a difficulty decrease.